Coming to a screen near you

We are in the midst of a communications revolution. Our global economy means that multinationals need to do business around the clock, spanning oceans and time zones. And nowhere is this trend felt more closely than in the financial services industry. Although this joined up world brings great opportunities, communicating across it is not always easy. Email is great for short notes, and the telephone is a proven technology. But sometimes you need ‘face time’, and until recently this has meant video-conferencing or travelling across town or time zones to meet in person.

Anyone who has tried to conduct business through a video-conference (or worse been the tech guy responsible for supporting them) can be forgiven for smiling ruefully at this point; even if your call connects, the resolution can be so poor that it can be impossible to ascertain people’s true feelings, that is until the call drops out halfway through a key point. And if you’ve caught a red-eye for a morning meeting before shooting back to the airport after lunch, you’ll know that business travel isn’t quite as glamorous as it seemed the first time.

A better way

The obvious limitations in existing technologies have driven companies like Cisco to develop a new generation of remote meeting solutions. Cisco’s TelePresence Meeting solution isn’t just video conferencing 2.0 though. Unlike older ISDN based technologies, TelePresence takes advantage of the cheap and plentiful bandwidth available to the modern enterprise by operating over an IP network. This means less need for specialist tech support, and an intuitive user interface – dialling up for a meeting is as easy as sending an email or making a phone call.

The solution relies on innovative breakthroughs in delivering very high-quality audio and visuals at very low latency with limited bandwidth utilisation. The near zero latency technology means participants can communicate in real time, meaning meetings can flow in the same way as face-to-face meetings. It also allows the meeting environment to be broadcast using the very best audio/visual technology.

The TelePresence solution delivers true life size images on 64 inch plasma screens, all in high-definition (1080p) video. The spatial audio technology allows voices to be transmitted from their ‘correct’ place in the meeting room – creating the impression of voices coming directly from each participant.

FST experienced this technology first hand in a visit to Cisco’s conferencing centre, outside Heathrow in London. To outline the benefits of the technology we attended a virtual meeting with Martin De Beer, SVP of Cisco’s Emerging Markets Technology Group, who at the time was in Bangalore. “TelePresence technology is twice the resolution of HD TV,” he explained. “If you ask me a tough question, and I sweat or I blink, you’re going to see it. That was never possible before.”

In our virtual conversation De Beer elaborated on this idea: “Body language can now become business language,” he suggested. “It’s not just what I say but how I say it. The reactions of other people in the room are also important, but all that is lost if you don’t have the visual interaction in a meeting. Using this kind of virtual meeting technology, it is possible to be present in any country in a matter of seconds.”

Having witnessed the system firsthand, FST was certainly impressed, and can vouch for the realistic nature of the experience – it was just like being in the same room as De Beer. Working across international markets we conduct a lot of interviews over the phone, and the TelePresence meeting did mean that time spent talking was much more productive. Being able to make eye contact and follow non-verbal cues allowed a rapport to be built much faster than in a telephone interview, and this facilitated De Beer to really open up and explain the benefits. Perhaps the best thing was that his excitement about the solution could literally be seen onscreen – it’s this sense of energy that can easily be sucked away by conventional communication channels.

Another key benefit must not be forgotten though: reliability. “This is a business class technology, which means it is readily available 99.9999 percent of the time. It uses the same technology as the telephone,” De Beer pointed out. “If you think of the millions of old phones deployed around Cisco and how reliable they are – this is the same.”

Telepresence in action

If TelePresence is, from a technical point of view, breath taking, what is the actual value to the business? It is after all an expensive technology to buy-in. As an example, De Beer estimated that by using it internally for meetings, in 2007 Cisco has saved over 200 million miles in air travel – saving money and reducing its carbon emissions by 10 percent.

The potential benefits of employing TelePresence in the financial services are plain to see. Financial services institutions by their nature straddle borders and geographies, and with developments like MiFID and SEPA the trans-national nature of banking in Europe is only going to accelerate.

With this structure it’s easy to see that the use of TelePresence in boardrooms could give the C-level executive team better access to quiz key figures through their European and global operations, hence making it easier to manage and monitor the institution more effectively. Indeed the fourth largest bank in the US, Wachovia, has started using this very technology to cut down on travel and facilitate better collaboration.

It’s not just at the executive level though that TelePresence could be valuable. It’s easy to imagine how brokers in worldwide dealing rooms could use the technology at the beginning and end of each day as they pick up from their Asian dealing rooms or hand over to New York. A regular face-to-face to agree trading strategies might well pay dividends.

As Howard Lichtman, from the Human Productivity Lab explains, once installed the functionality of Telepresence systems just seems to grow. “You see systems that get used 100 to even 150 plus hours per month per endpoint, and you see people doing types of meeting in those Telepresence environments that they never would have done with the plastic-camera-on-top-of-the-TV-set-on-top-of-the-dessert-cart,” he argues. “You’re actually getting the ROI that the video conference guys promised but never delivered. You’re keeping people off the planes, getting a time-to-market advantage, and improving productivity.”

A good example of this additional benefit is found at HSBC. Ken Harvey, the global CIO at banking giant HSBC is a fan and he told us how HSBC is on the “front edge” of using virtual Telepresence rooms, as well as putting high definition monitors into people’s homes to enable remote working. “I can light up your desktop, and be looking right at you in a high definition monitor. You look at me and we have a more engaging conversation than you can on a speakerphone.” And for Harvey the benefits are multi-faceted: “It's very green. You end up reducing office space and travel, which is helpful from a corporate expense standpoint. And actually, human lifestyle is improved.”

However, as well as all the internal productivity gains that are possible, perhaps the most exciting potential use of this technology is in the customer facing environment. The use of Telepresence in retail bank branches could open up a whole new richness of customer experience offer. At smaller branches with a Telepresence room, instead of waiting until the specific Tuesday afternoon when a specialist financial adviser is in town, a customer could enter the branch on spec, and be ushered through to the same financial adviser who is permanently based at headquarters. The value of this availability and flexibility of service is enormous to the bank that can execute correctly.

I’ve seen the future. . .

“The biggest fan of this technology is my CEO John Chambers,” said De Beer. “I showed it to him in June 2005, and he said to me “this will transform business forever”. He is still talking about it like that – he shows the technology to every CEO who visits with him, and they ultimately end up wanting it.” Business leaders aren’t the only ones who see the potential in the system. De Beer visited Tony Blair and George Bush on separate occasions last year; both remarked they could see how vital and important this technology would be in political communications.

Perhaps the biggest advantage is the flexibility and agility it allows modern business.  For proof of that we need look no further that ourtime with De Beer, who had to fly to Bangalore on emergency business just before our scheduled meeting. “Prior to TelePresence, we would have had to postpone this meeting, or even cancel it. As it is, I could reschedule and still cover all the engagements I had ledged to meet. TelePresence will help CEOs be more productive.” Which is exactly what they want to be. Welcome to the future of business.

For more on Cisco’s TelePresence Meeting solution please visit
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns669/
networking_solutions_solution_segment_home.html.